July 8, 2012

The media furor over how Online Learning will make college irrelevant because everybody will go to MIT or Stanford from their bedroom reminds me that when I was a kid, you heard a lot about "correspondence courses." Strivers took advanced courses by mail back then.

In Evelyn Waugh stories, a sure clue that a character is a lower middle class dweeb doomed to never rise in a society run by Oxbridge grads and Old Etonians is that he boasts of having signed up for some correspondence courses.

How much has the effectiveness of distance learning improved due to technology? I'm sure it's a little better now, but it seemed like the most motivated correspondence course students could learn a fair amount, although most just gave up. Or, is the current hubbub reflective not of a revolutionary improvement in technique, but that Stanford and MIT are putting their glamorous bricks and mortar brand names on some distance learning products, with the implication that some of their elite institution magic pixie dust will somehow rub off on guys living in their moms' basement?

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More specifically, colleges in Europe and here with prestige but limited ability to accept new students and a desire to increase their income, can put on the web and issue certificates and credit for distance learning. As tuition increases and student loans and the desire to take on that debt becomes a bubble that crashes, the desire by somewhat august but down at the heels institutions (think the impoverished aristocrats in the novels by Henry James) to make MONEY is irresistible.

August but declining European universities could certainly pick up ambitious young men and women who figure $5K for say, University of Milan Accounting Degree beats $20K a year at Big State U. Heck they can work part-time, study and avoid any and all debt. Gain first mover advantage.

As a commenter on Heartiste noted, fifty years ago you lied about graduating from a fancy college to impress women. Now you lie about being in prison.

In Evelyn Waugh stories, a sure clue that a character is a lower middle class dweeb doomed to never rise in a society run by Oxbridge grads and Old Etonians was that he had signed up for some correspondence courses.

Right. It just seems like a way of stamping "LOSER" across your forehead. Who is going to be impressed that you're taking courses at MIT's online school when some Bangladeshi who lives in an open sewer with an internet connection can as well?

I suspect many employers will also be suspicious as well. What's to keep a scheming young lad from paying someone to take the tests for them if its all online? At least in class they can either recognize pupils in person or screen by IDs, etc.

And for science courses, how will you recreate lab courses online? Some areas, perhaps but many cannot.

How can an enterprising young student get to know the prof to the same depth as before, get experience doing an internship for him, get top notch references from him, etc.?

Also, there is the social aspect of college- parties, making lifelong networking connections, etc. - I suspect many students themselves might be hesitant for these reasons as well.

These are just a few of the problems that come up, which are not easily addressed.

You may save some money online, but for many people, especially those with talent, you can probably get scholarships, go in state, go to a community college for part of the time, etc. to deal with the money issues.

In Evelyn Waugh stories, a sure clue that a character is a lower middle class dweeb doomed to never rise in a society run by Oxbridge grads and Old Etonians is that he boasts of having signed up for some correspondence courses.

There's a Simpsons episode where a guy named Frank Grimes who was poor growing up and had a hard life joins to work at the nuclear plant after getting his degree in nuclear physics from correspondence courses. He ends up hating Homer for his happy go lucky ways and becomes his enemy. He dies at the end of the episode in an unfortunate accident.

Also, there is the social aspect of college- parties, making lifelong networking connections, etc. - I suspect many students themselves might be hesitant for these reasons as well.

50 years ago the dorms were sex segregated and you couldn't bring girls into your dorm. Not to mention that not as many women went to college. Colleges were relatively austere and monkish compared to today. This "social aspect" is relatively novel. Not sure the experience of getting gangbanged by the frat at a kegger merits keeping the higher education bubble going.

I've done a lot of school, math, accounting, CS, then law, but the only class to whip me was an online relational database design class from UC Extension. I loved the text (still have it) and aced the first section, but just stopped and let it go.

I really need classmates, the competition, and live teacher interaction.

Prestige comes into play here. Assuming that the elite schools maintain rigor and don't mind failing a lot of people--and to preserve their brand, they should fail a lot of people--a MITx Certificate of Certification is a more impressive credential than a BS from Local State University.

"Who is going to be impressed that you're taking courses at MIT's online school"

No one is going to be impressed that you're taking courses. That's like being an aspiring actor.

If MIT manages the program correctly, passing the courses and getting the Certificate of Certification is the impressive bit. That's like being an actor who has been in a movie.

Let's say that MITx is as rigorous as getting a 5 on the AP Calculus AB exam. 50,000 students get a 5 every year on the AP Calc AB--that's a pretty elite group. If every single one of them goes on to do MITx in their spare time at Big State U, the MITx Certificate of Certification still marks them out above the herd of BS's. That's pretty valuable if your college isn't US News top 25 or 50.

Call me old fashioned, but you should sign up for a course because you want to learn, not because you want a credential.

Sure, your future employer is going to want to verify that you actually did learn something, and for that you'll need some kind of certificate. But you can get that with a reasonably-priced education at State U, and then continue edify yourself in college and throughout your life with those newer courses.

If MIT manages the program correctly, passing the courses and getting the Certificate of Certification is the impressive bit.

Well yes, it's obvious how they could basically run the program as a de facto IQ testing operation for employers and maybe make its graduates as valuable as those of brick and mortar elite universities. But what makes you think it will?

Would it have even received this much positive publicity if its intention was clearly to be a high-IQ identifier and sorter? The coverage in the MSM seems to be sewn into the standard liberal narrative of globalism, opportunity for all, democratization, etc.

"By the 1930s, the Home Instruction Department had customers worldwide, shipping lesson manuals, textbooks, workbooks, and school supplies—all packed in a single box and marked with the now-familiar "Calvert silhouette"—to students in more than 50 countries. Calvert curricula reached the farthest outposts of civilization, delivered to parents by dog sled, camel caravan, even parachuted from airplanes."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_School#Homeschooling_history

This sailor set up a cool roadmap to getting an accredited college degree by testing out of ENTIRE course load with standardized testing (CLEP exams mostly).http://www.123collegedegree.com/

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Online courses/programs offer an alternative to the high cost of college education. Who wants to be saddled with hundreds of thousands of college debt in this economy?

Of course, certain course such as laboratory courses in the sciences can't be duplicated online-they need to be done in person. Making life-long connections in college is overrated (most people just fall away) unless one enrolls in a graduate program.

I was home-schooled from 7th through 9th grade, which was very nearly "correspondence classes" as it was mostly self-directed learning from textbooks. Conversely, I'm 2/3rds of the way through a Masters in Computer Science through USC's distance education program. Just being able to watch lectures and carefully selecting professors through public ratings systems is a serious augmentation over textbook learning. The difference in degree is a difference kind. "Blackboard" hasn't polished their web interfaces to the level of sites like Google/Gmail/Facebook, but there is big money in this game and someone will do it right. Maybe online learning will never produce Stanford-level students, but it can definitely take out the low end of the education market.

Back in the days when I made my $200 / semester tuition working in a coffee shop, employers were impressed by potential employees who showed the industriousness to go through college. Now that almost half of graduates can't get a job, many of the fortunate employed are working at jobs that don't require college, and almost all of them are still living at home, I would be more impressed by someone who was intelligent enough to get an education without going tens of thousands of dollars into debt.

There are a trillion dollars of unpaid student loans outstanding. Three quarters of these loans are not being repaid. To think that this can continue is like thinking that home prices can only go up.

And what do we get for all of this money? The least educated citizenry of any industrialized country. I did admissions for a well known medical school for years. Every year hundreds of Americans would apply whose grasp of their own language was less than kids who grew up speaking Korean.

Maybe schools like Phoenix University are not the answer, but neither are schools where the only thing students are taught is to have high self-esteem.

Mass education only makes sense for a large industrial workforce. But we decided to de-industrialize. So we had all this infrastructure in place and all these students and a culture of trying to churn as many students as possible into college. There wasn't enough industry left to absorb them, so we pretended that there was this ethereal "knowledge" economy out there to absorb them.

What we really have is a feudal economy run by lawyers and financiers.

Didn't spot the names Gates, Ellison, or Zuckerberg in there--all the prestige of American Oxbridge and they didn't even need to pay the full freight.

Of course the admissions depts. will remain very anxious to publicize that so-and-so famous drop-out was there a whole 1.5 credits, because it's still in the admissions/PR interest somehow for this to be widely known.

The least educated citizenry of any industrialized country. I did admissions for a well known medical school for years. Every year hundreds of Americans would apply whose grasp of their own language was less than kids who grew up speaking Korean.

I earned a BSEE through Cook's Institute of Electronic Engineering in the 80s. The education was decent, the degree worthless.

They taught old technology, which was actually good, because even then most EE programs de-emphasized analog design. I got a job as a technician, then an engineering technician, then a technical writer, but I have never been able to get an Engineer job as such.

Well, not strictly true. My job title today is engineer-locomotive engineer that is. Only a coincidence: I never put my degree on the railroad application. I later found that was a good move on my part because the railroad was not hiring anyone with a degree at that time because they found out that so many people with degrees, thus alternatives, left after the first year or so because of the lifestyle. I live in a small town and made $110,000 last year. I'm single, I own two houses outright,rent one out, and drive old beater cars with no payments and liability insurance only. Yeah, not going to a real college was a bad idea....

Steve, you haven't mentioned that both the CA Assembly and the CA State Senate passed (of course, we have a one-party state) bills last week that make California a "Sanctuary State."

Of course, Brown will sign it into law; of course, Valley growers and owners of roofing companies will be happy to get all those ILLEGAL ALIENS (I enjoy saying it) from AZ.

Yes, Tom Ammiano, that diminutive ball of gay glitter from San Fran was the author of the bill in the Assembly. He said he wants to put out the welcome flag to all those poor aliens.

I'm thinking he figures a percentage of them are brown gay macho men.

Next, I expect him to introduce a bill to demand the Rainbow flag fly at the capitol building.

I called all my reps (about the insanity of being a "sssssancturay sssssstate" (that's the Ammiano pronunciation) and about the insanity of the bullet train....lots of good it does.

I predicted that the person answering the phone at the Gov's office would be a gay intern and I was right. Young, male, gay and sooooooo upset with me, dissssssdainful really, incapable of hiding hissssss contempttttt for my positionssssss.

I am in the process of looking for places in Nevada I might want to live. High property taxes, but no income tax (I'm retired).

I can't live in this insanity any longer. Oregon is too liberal and too wet, athough pretty.

I was a computer programmer (we like to say "software engineer"). Seeing all the lame-ass hindus taking all of the jobs in computer programming, I began attending an online law school (which managed to be just good enough to be able to sit for the Bar in California). I passed both the California Bar and the USPTO patent bar exams, and was employed as a patent attorney for a while. Now I am a computer programmer again, and very much happier and at least as well paid (very low six figures) as most patent practitioners from non-elite law schools. Annecdote!

Well, no matter how you look at it, the current college system is just a vestige of the days when it was cheaper to hire a guy to stand up and talk to people than it was to buy a book. It's survived and thrived this long on snob appeal and the desire of teenagers to get away from home, but things seem to be reverting back to the days when rich people went to fancy schools (Harvard, Yale, etc.)and most regular people just studied and took a qualification exam for the job they wanted (Abraham Lincoln, for instance took the bar exam without ever going to college.) In the future it will be best for the majority of students to think of a college diploma as a job ticket that needs to be punched as quickly and cheaply as possible.

As for the efficacy of online education, this study found that online students consistently outperformed traditional students. Online lectures, videos, email, smartphones and ebooks have improved distance learning quite a lot, and I can't see why it shouldn't continue to get better.

Personally, I think that I barely ever attended a class lecture that didn't seem like a waste of time that could have been better spent just reading the book. The situation is even worse since professors have started using powerpoint in their lectures. The poor students barely have time to take notes, much less ask questions in these classes. At this point, almost anyone who isn't doing AP, CLEP, DSST or the local CC for at least their general education courses is just wasting money.

anon:"Well, no matter how you look at it, the current college system is just a vestige of the days when it was cheaper to hire a guy to stand up and talk to people than it was to buy a book. It's survived and thrived this long on snob appeal and the desire of teenagers to get away from home, but things seem to be reverting back to the days when rich people went to fancy schools (Harvard, Yale, etc.)and most regular people just studied and took a qualification exam for the job they wanted..."

I see two tendencies at my University.

1) The postgrad course I run is a prestige qualification in a lot of countries outside the UK, so a lot of students come from around the world to study it here.

2) The undergraduate course I teach on is UK mid-ranking. Many of the undergraduates live at home with their parents in London while studying for a degree. With the economy ever worsening I see this as becoming more common for non-elite Universities, and possibly for elite Universities in major population centres like London. When my son turns 18 I'm thinking of encouraging him to stay home while attending a good London college like UCL or Imperial.

Distance communication tools like email and Blackboard are helpful in course delivery, but I don't see them replacing lectures and tutorials. When I ran an online course, I found that reproducing the necessary level of personal interaction you get in a tutorial* took a lot *more* work on my part, with individual weekly submissions & feedback for each student, and this would not scale up well.

If you don't care for or need the interaction, then yes reading books and watching videos is fine, but I think many or most people need an additional element.

*In the UK an undergrad student typically has one lecture and one tutorial/week per subject, each one hour. The tutorial involves answering questions and discussing the subject. They may sometimes be run by postgrad teaching assistants, usually PhD students, but are more commonly held by full lecturers/professors, who also do all the marking/grading.

anon:"Personally, I think that I barely ever attended a class lecture that didn't seem like a waste of time that could have been better spent just reading the book. The situation is even worse since professors have started using powerpoint in their lectures. The poor students barely have time to take notes..."

The lecturers don't give access to their Powerpoint slides on Blackboard?

Personally I didn't use Powerpoint, I wrote on a whiteboard, but the students complained - I think they didn't like having to take notes! So now I use fairly minimal Powerpoint slides, it's important to have as few words as possible on each slide.

It might be naïve to think that the college drop out will regroup and get an advanced degree from a correspondence college, but that is not where I see elearning being so important. There are neighborhoods in my vicinity where white people simply cannot send their kids to public school. If these people have a few kids, they may have to resort to home schooling, though only 2-3% nation wide do it now, we have to prepare for the demographic change. Am I being alarmist? The Derb mentions Huntington, where the schools have been taken over by the landscaper's gang affiliated kids.

It helps to realize that, for a large fraction of students, a bricks and mortar college is functionally equivalent to a correspondence course because most lectures are pretty worthless.

Most classes have a comprehensive textbook that has everything you need to know in it. You read the textbook and you learn the material. Lectures, at best, add a little variety. And most lecturers are terrible to boot. So, bricks and mortar really just come down to a correspondence course where you waste a few hours a week wathching a poor rehash of the material.

I know, I hardly ever when to class in college. I just read the book and did the homework.

So what makes bricks and mortar different? ENTRANCE REQUIREMENTS. A very good IQ screen, and in the worthwhile majors, that is all that really matters. Also, secondarily, SELF DISCIPLINE, repeatedly showing you can read a long textbook and consistently do homework.

So, the most important featgure for a successful online extension school, ENTRANCE REQUIREMENTS, and secondarily rigorous anti-cheating protection for exams to show the person actually read the textbooks.

Nobody flunks out of school anymore, so pasing classes doesn't mean much.

If MIT manages the program correctly, passing the courses and getting the Certificate of Certification is the impressive bit.

Well yes, it's obvious how they could basically run the program as a de facto IQ testing operation for employers and maybe make its graduates as valuable as those of brick and mortar elite universities. But what makes you think it will?

First, MIT snobbery to protect their brand name. Professional pride by the MITx administrators to not let MITx fall too far behind MIT-Cambridge. I don't think MIT is doing this just to dilute their product.

Would it have even received this much positive publicity if its intention was clearly to be a high-IQ identifier and sorter?

I don't think they're consciously doing this as and end run around Griggs vs Duke Power, but that is a probable result. Since it's a high-end college doing it, it's magically immune to Disparate Impact.

The coverage in the MSM seems to be sewn into the standard liberal narrative of globalism, opportunity for all, democratization, etc.

The media is marinated in the Standard Model of equal human potential, so of course equalizing opportunity will make everyone MIT caliber. Plus computers are associated with smart people, so obviously computers make you smarter. Computers + opportunity = intelligence, right?

The University of Oxford had this debate... back in 1857, even down to considering the whether people would use the distance learning to bag social prestige.

Good catch, very well played, sir. "The Reverend E Hawkins, Provost of Oriel College, wrote to the Vice Chancellor saying that the AA implied too much and that he could not condone the conferral of a 'quasi degree for life upon young men of eighteen into whose character we make no inquiry and about whose religious knowledge we may be uninformed, simply because they have passed an exam in mere rudiments of knowledge of other kinds'."

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Replace 'character' and 'religious knowledge' with 'PC groupthink' (same thing really) you can see that academia's desire to be the post-Reformation enforcer of dogma has been going strong for centuries.

One hbd aspect of distance learning/e-learning/etc. that is seldom noted in mainstream discussions: Easy access to huge amounts of information (like MIT's open courseware lectures/notes, iTunes U, Khan, the wonderful podcasts and blogs from every area of science) is of different value to different kinds of people. Very smart snf motivated people will get a huge boost from this--if you're motivated and ready to learn something, you can learn it with no permission or payment of tuition. Probably you don't get a credential, but you get to understand things you didn't before. For people on the left two thirds of the bell curve, probably this stuff will have limited importance, outside of maybe being an alternative to community college or a little nicer way to be homeschooled.

This is not remotely a technology for flattening out inequalities based on ability, though it will help flattening out some based on access (like a really bright high school junior at a crappy rural school can use open courseware to study calculus or diffEQ or something, even if there's no teacher who can really teach him the material). It's an amplifier of the differences in abilities and personalities in the population.

These programs aren't going to be a solution for average white people.

big corps will hire 3rd world peasants with MITx certificates but for a regular white person it will be considered an insufficient credential.

for third world peasants, getting the certificate is an inspiring story of how they managed to learn in spite of everything. but for average whites, if you show up with the online certificate they will say "why didn't you go to a real college, next"

There was the PLATO network developed back in the 60s that was a proto PC and internet system. One of its major purposes was education and delivering lessons and courses through the network. It had all the elements necessary - forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, graphics, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, games, etc. It was used at the U of Illinois but it never really got anywhere.

The more class- and status-ridden a society or field is, the more important are the connections one makes attending college in person. (The all-male dorms of 50 years ago were an advantage, because you'd *have to* socialize with other men.) In fields where one's actual knowledge of the subject is more important than who you know, online courses will do people good. Waugh's aristos may have looked down on the lower-middle-class chap taking a correspondence course, but if the fellow were smart and diligent enough, and employed where what he knew was more important than who he was related to, he might have ended up with as much money as those aristos, even if he'd never be invited to their garden parties.

Online courses offered by Ivies looking to make a buck off their cache attached to their names: It reminds me of the movie The Grass Is Greener in which cash-poor aristos, played by Cary Grant and Jean Simmons, allow their mansion home and its stately grounds to be visited by the hoi polloi on guided tours, for which the couple charge.

Robert Mitchum plays an American oil millionaire brash who hits on the aristo wife Jean Simmons.

Correspondence school was a popular choice for child actors back in the day:

http://www.americanschoolofcorr.com/about

Today may correspondence courses like rubber technology are important in those industries, and are useful for career advancement.

As far as those online courses being given by the big schools. Perhaps they are trying to identify future talent. Or given today's foreign policy, 'high value targets'.

BTW with the withering of the US industrially culturally and financially, why would the big schools stand the test of time. My guess is it is just a matter of time before there is a downsizing in university education. The best school in the world used to be that tree in Athens Socrates taught under.

I think everyone is missing the long-term picture here. An aspect of being an academic in higher ed is not just that you teach courses and do research, but that you set the terms of what the content of a course or degree is. In a world where everyone gets online certificates, anyone (or thing) can teach courses. But who will decide what is taught? By getting into the online game early, prestige universities can maintain their position by becoming the institutions that create the standards for certificate content. Thus ensuring jobs for MIT and Standford profs into the distant future.

What classes are studied online has a lot more to do with either interest or requirements for certification or graduation or whatever. What liberal arts classes can you make the EE or CS or accounting students take? That is in some sense a chance to influence how educated citizens think. Requiring some economics classes probably gives a different result than requiring some sociology classes, for example.

To the extent you're selling certification in some area, of course, there is no reason to require anything unrelated to your field--an economics or CS student might benefit from a class in accounting, but probably doesn't need it, and there is no point at all in requiring him to study Shakespeare or geology or ancient history.

What I expect is that many liberal arts kinds of classes will be taken by people with an interest, often older people, retirees, housewives, empty-nesters, etc., with some time. Always loved Jane Austen but wish you knew more of the background? Always wanted to know a bit about philosophy? I think you will also see this with science and math--lots of smart people are interested, if they can get an accessible dose of it. Podcasts like TWIV probably have a great future. And most people wholisten will learn a lot but leave it there, and a few will change careers or go back to grad school in a new field as a result. And the result will be an amplification of existing differences. People who have the desire and spare time and determination will be able to learn all kinds of stuff, from conversational French to Byzantine history to game theory. Alngside that, there will be a million ways to waste time, endless porn tailored to every kink, complex and well-crafted video games, and whatever arises when you cross Facebook with TMZ and ESPN. The smartest/most interested people will be almost unimaginably better informed than the average people, even the average people considered relatively well-educated.

Changes are inevitable that is why we should expose ourselves to these changes to cope up things we are not capable to avoid. Technology is fast changing as well as the way we are learning about it that I think we should gather enough information for information is a friend.

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